Tickets Are Still Available for Denver Rare Beers on Thursday

Events like Denver Rare Beers, a festival benefiting Pints for Prostates, have become a rarity. Colorado used to be home to many premium beer festivals such as Breckenridge's Big Beers Festival, What the Funk, Bull & Bush's Vintage Christmas Tasting, the WeldWerks Invitational (which just announced that it will be back in 2025) and a host of Avery festivals celebrating special and rare beers.

None of those events happened — or will happen — in 2024 except for Denver Rare Beers. It takes place from noon to 4 p.m. on Thursday, October 10, at Bierstadt Lagerhaus (2875 Blake Street). Tickets are $210.60 and a small number are still available online

"I can understand why some of the other events have gone on hiatus," says Rick Lyke, founder of Pints for Prostates and organizer of Denver Rare Beers. "It's not inexpensive to do this," he notes, adding that it's difficult to put on a festival of this magnitude in the post-COVID world.

Yet Rare Beers lives on. A venue change, due to election-related scheduling at the usual McNichols Center, has Rare Beers back at a brewery for the first time in years. "We started this event at Wynkoop," Lyke recalls.

The event is also more intimate than ever before. This year, about 350 tickets were available. The festival's peak was a few years back when it sold 600 VIP and 200 general admission tickets. After that, Lyke made the decision to have a smaller number of tickets available but at a higher price, making the event feel more "VIP" for everyone.

Much has been said about the "death of beer festivals," but the truth is that in Colorado they are, in many ways, as healthy as ever — though the setup is often different these days. Many towns are now throwing festivals centered around fifteen to thirty breweries, and more festivals than ever are paying breweries fair rates for bringing kegs (something that rarely happened ten to fifteen years ago). When people talk about the death of beer festivals, they're really talking about specific types of beer festivals — premium festivals like Rare Beers.
Lyke continues to adapt. He's managed to run a successful festival every year. This will mark the fifteenth festival, with one pivot during early COVID that had the festival run virtually. Lyke has managed to raise money at every festival for the Pints for Prostates nonprofit, too. "It's a fundraiser, so if it became [a situation where] we couldn't raise money from it, we would stop doing it," he says.

One thing that hasn't changed: There will be a free prostate cancer screening tent set up outside the festival. It will run from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. "That's open to the public," says Lyke. "You don't need a ticket to get a screening." Lyke himself is a cancer survivor, and a simple blood screening saved his life. "This can mean the world to some guys," he notes.

Some of the shine has worn off of craft beer, especially "hype beer" like barrel-aged stouts, barleywines, IPAs and wild ales. Gone are the days when people would line up for hours on end to score a few select bottles. Some of those people aged out (or had to cut back for health reasons); others moved into the bourbon world, where hyped bottles are fetching many times their pre-COVID valuations.

There's also a major shift in the supply of these beers. No longer do you have only a few fantastic makers offering 14 percent ABV barrel-aged dessert stouts. You can find dozens of quality makers across Colorado doing these, not to mention many more across the country.

What Rare Beers has done as a festival is curate a superstar list of local and national breweries, and convince those breweries to bring some of the most coveted and hard-to-find beers in their lineups. "Everywhere you turn, there's going to be a beer that you probably won't get a chance to try again," says Lyke. "It's a testament to the creativity of craft beer and the fabulous brewers that we have."
Event organizers are also struggling to adjust in the bumpy landscape of the past few years. This is why you see more local, municipality-led or partnered beer festivals, and less of the exotic, one-off beer festivals. GABF itself has continued to adapt. In many ways, these festivals have to adapt to survive.

Rare Beers continues to be complementary to GABF instead of competitive. The festivals never overlap — that's why Rare Beers is always held from noon to 4 p.m. each year (this year, it's on Thursday instead of Friday because of venue availability).

GABF is also large enough and has the resources to try new and creative things each year, while Rare Beers has a smaller, tighter focus. The two festivals couldn't be more different, but both manage to be bucket-list items for many beer travelers. "Typically 65 to 70 percent of tickets to the festival are sold to out-of-state folks," says Lyke. "We usually get [ticket holders] from 40 to 45 states and five to six countries."

As for an increase in difficulty recruiting breweries to the festival in a post-COVID world, it doesn't sound like Lyke has run into that issue. "When we mentioned holding the event at Bierstadt, several of the brewers told us that we made it easy for them, that they're already hanging out at Bierstadt when they're not at the convention center," he explains. Four breweries — Avery, Sam Adams, Sierra Nevada and Great Divide — have poured at every single Rare Beers event and will continue that streak this year.

Denver Rare Beers Brewery Preview

The lineup is incredibly strong, as always. With these types of festivals being less common in 2024, it feels a little more special this year. Here are some highlights:

Side Project Brewing is back after a multi-year hiatus from the festival. The lines for Side Project have historically been the longest, and for good reason: The brewery makes some of the most delicious and decadent barrel-aged beers in the world. Along the same lines, Moksa Brewing, Ozark Beer, Forager Brewing and Kane Brewing are reliable, best-in-class barrel-aged producers.

Two banana beers are at the festival — one from Other Half Brewing, and another from Kane.

Some of the best national brands will be pouring, including Sierra Nevada Brewing, Firestone Walker Brewing, Dogfish Head Brewery and Fremont Brewing. And while people line up at GABF for Utopias, Sam Adams brings special variants of that beer to Rare Beers, where there is literally no line. This year it will be pouring its 2021 Utopias aged on Balaton cherries. If it's anything like the vintage cherry version the brewery has brought to this festival in the past, it is well worth a taste (or three).

Plenty of other heavy hitters will be present, including Trillium Brewing, Radiant Beer, Perennial Beer, Modern Times Beer, The Lost Abbey, Wren House Brewing and Cloudburst Brewing.

Looking for lagers in a sea of strong, flavor-bomb beers? The festival has that, too. Bierstadt Lagerhaus, Cohesion Brewing and Good Word Brewing are all pouring.

Colorado will be well represented, too. Besides the first two lager breweries above, you can find Amalgam Brewing, Avery Brewing, Burns Family Artisan Ales, Cerebral Brewing, Comrade Brewing, Crooked Stave Brewing, Great Divide Brewing, Jagged Mountain Brewery, Left Hand Brewing, Odyssey Beerwerks, River North Brewery, Verboten Brewing, WeldWerks Brewing and Westbound & Down Brewing.